Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

PranPriye This movie was referred in a book I was reading - Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil. I found the movie quite boring, picking up pace only in the last half an hour. Ione Skye (Diana) was amazing - a natural beauty and impressive expressions. John Cusack (Llyod) was average. John Mahoney (Diana's Dad) was good.

Thanos Karagioras "Say Anything..." is a romantic comedy movie in which on the one hand we have a girl who has the potential of being a very successful person and to have a great life according to the standards of the society. One the other hand we have a boy who still does not know what to do with his life and what job he wants to do. Those teenagers they fall in love the summer after they finish high school and just before the girl leaves for college.I really enjoyed this movie because of the plot but also because it had a lot of moments of controversial feelings, something that made it even more interesting. I believe that is unnecessary to say that the interpretation of John Cusack was simply magnificent and also Ione Skye's interpretation was equally good.After you will watch "Say Anything..." only then you will understand why until today it is considered as one of the best romantic movies of all time. I strongly recommend this movie to everyone and do not be confused by my title, you will understand it after watching the movie.

disinterested_spectator Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back again. This formula for a romantic comedy is all right when all you want to do is pass the time watching a mildly amusing movie. But when it is one of the movies listed in Steven Jay Schneider's "1001 Movies You Must See before You Die," you expect a little more. I suspect it is the fact that Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this movie that mesmerized critics into thinking it was something special.In addition to the formula noted above, this movie also employs the standard Hollywood device of having a woman forced to make a choice between love and something else, and then when she chooses love, as the formula requires, she ends up getting the something else too. Usually, the woman's choice is between a boring but respectable man whom her family approves of and who will be able to provide for her in comfort, and a charming man that she loves but who is poor and irresponsible. But when she decides to marry the poor guy, it turns out he has all the money. The movie "French Kiss" (1995) would be an example of this.In this movie, the woman is Diane, and she herself is the boring but respectable person whom her father, Mr. Court, approves of and who will be able to provide for herself in comfort owing to the fact that she is on her way to having a successful career after she gets out of college. This constitutes a slight variation in the formula. In any event, she must choose between her own education/career and Lloyd, the poor and irresponsible guy she loves whose idea of a career is that of being a kickboxer. Of course, there are movies in which a woman must choose between a career and a husband, but it is usually a glamorous career like show business, as in "Imitation of Life" (1959), not the kind of respectable career that Diane is pursuing.Actually, Lloyd's charm wears a little thin. He is living with his sister, who is a single mom, and he gets on her nerves with his antics. She makes a mark for the volume knob on his boom box, beyond which level he must not go, because it disturbs the neighbors. But he apparently does not care about that, because later in the movie, he takes the boom box and plays his and Diane's song at volume ten near her house in the middle of the night to prove his love for her, probably waking up all the neighbors on the block. It is one thing to be irresponsible. It is another thing to be an inconsiderate jerk. One wonders just how long Diane is going to put up with him, especially since his plan seems to be to just let her support him, as when he tells her father, "What I want to do for a living is be with your daughter." I guess you could say that in this movie it is the man who chooses between having a glamorous career like kickboxing and just being a house husband.Presumably as a way of avoiding the obvious formulaic nature of this film, a little trouble for Mr. Court with the Internal Revenue Service is added in. It begins rather melodramatically, with a couple of IRS agents showing up at his house at night. In real life, an auditor would begin his investigation by showing up at Court's place of business, which is a nursing home, and asking to see the books. In a subsequent scene, an IRS agent does show up at the nursing home and asks ominous questions like, "Your income, Mr. Court, hasn't changed substantially in seventeen years…. Why would you stay so long with an operation that is clearly not a growth enterprise?" Wow! Isn't that incriminating!By this time, we are starting to think that the IRS agents are absurd caricatures, and that Court will be vindicated in the end. But it turns out that Court really is guilty. However, if he has been stealing money from his patients, then it would seem he is in more trouble than just not paying his taxes. There should still be fraud charges to deal with. But the movie glosses over that.Once we accept that Court is guilty of defrauding his nursing home patients, there are further incongruities that the movie presents without explaining. For example, Court goes to a store to buy some luggage, but all his credit cards are rejected. At the same time, Diane discovers thousands of dollars in cash squirreled away in a drawer. So, why didn't Court use the cash to buy the luggage? Cash leaves no tracks, and even the IRS would not have been aware of that purchase.Beyond that, the movie seems to at first to suggest that Court was stealing all that money in order to provide for his daughter, and so we are supposed to like him for that. But then it turns out that he was using all of his ill-gotten gains to buy collectibles, like a nine thousand dollar juke box. In other words, he's an idiot. The function of this IRS subplot is to break the excessive attachment between father and daughter so that she is free to leave him for Lloyd. But calling in the Feds so that a girl can leave home and marry the boy she loves is a bit much.

dee.reid Most of us know about that scene, that famous scene where the guy is standing in the front yard outside the house of his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend, I should say), after she just broke up with him the day before. It's early in the morning when he's decided to pull off this little stunt, and, standing next to his car, he's holding up a huge boom-box over his head blaring Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes."This is the most iconic and famous scene in Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything...", his 1989 debut which he both wrote and directed. This is a movie I've seen in clips over the years but have never actually sat down and watched the whole thing in its entirety. I've read the critical praise (the most significant coming from the late film critic Roger Ebert), "Entertainment Weekly" naming it the greatest modern romance AND ranking it at #11 on their list of 50 best high school movies, and a Valentine's Day article in "The Washington Post" from 2006 titled "What I Did For Lloyd." Now I've finally sat down and watched the movie and understood where it's all coming from.The 1980s were a wasteland of teen comedies. John Hughes (1950-2009) was behind the best of them ("The Breakfast Club," "Sixteen Candles"). At the tail end of the decade, came Cameron Crowe and his "Say Anything...". This film is much like any teen comedy/romance to come out at that time (and ever since) and begins as such, with a "noble underachiever" who falls for an ultra-intelligent, if socially unskilled, beauty who seems way out of his league. The movie also seems to at least partially pre-figure the Seattle "grunge" era of the early '90s (which was spear-headed by the legendary grunge band Nirvana), but the exact details of this implication are part of another discussion entirely.Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) is the noble underachiever who dares to ask out the beautiful high school valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye) the day after their graduation. Lloyd's ambitions are pretty slim, since the only thing he can really see himself doing in the immediate future is Kick-boxing (which at that time was still a relatively new thing). So at least he's honest about his life's aspirations: he knows what he wants to do, and he especially knows what he DOESN'T want to do - which does shock some people and makes him the most truthful character in the entire film. But it's an even bigger shock when he decides that he wants to go out with the lovely Diane Court.Diane, on the other hand, has her whole life set out before her. She's worked hard her entire life to work her way up to the top of her high school graduating class. And all that hard work pays off when she learns she's been granted a fellowship to further her studies overseas in England. And she'll be leaving at the end of the summer. And then there's Lloyd, who impulsively asks her out on a date and much to his surprise, she accepts his invitation. They do go out, they enjoy one another's company, they connect, and their feelings of just being "friends with potential" do gradually deepen into love. While Diane's over-protective father James Court (John Mahoney) seems to like Lloyd, he mostly sees him as a distraction and someone who's going to steer her away from the future she's worked so hard to achieve.We like Lloyd and Diane both, and we want them to be together. But like any good love story, there has to be roadblocks, and these roadblocks hurt...In a major subplot, however, James, owner of an elderly-care facility, is also being investigated by the IRS for tax fraud. This subplot would be a most unnecessary distraction from an otherwise touching teen romance, but the way everything turns out and why it's even happened in the first place is just one of the many unique charms of "Say Anything..." and why it stands out amongst most teen romance films made before and since. A less ambitious movie would JUST be about Lloyd & Diane's relationship and nothing else, but "Say Anything..." has other things on its mind beside those two - even though it still hurts us when outside forces cause them to separate for a time. "Say Anything..." wants to show us how their relationship is affecting everyone around them, and how everyone around them is affecting them, as well."Say Anything..." is a wondrously scripted, acted, and directed film; it's definitely an early indication of the skill of a writer and director with huge ideas, huge potential. Crowe knew his characters well and chose his performers even better. John Cusack and Ione Skye are the dynamic young stars playing Lloyd and Diane. Like John Hughes before him and who dominated the early portion of the 1980s teen scene, Cameron Crowe knew how to make a "smart" teen film: one that is not filled with stupid sex jokes and even stupider characters - teens and adults alike.With that in mind, I can see how an audience so cynical in 1989 after being bombarded with teen comedy after teen comedy throughout the earlier portion of the decade can very easily write off "Say Anything..." as just Another Teen Movie. It's a teen film, yes, and an occasionally very funny one, too, but it's also an extraordinarily moving and compelling one, as well. So I can also see how that cynicism would wear off once the movie really begins to reveal itself to the audience - especially with its emotional honesty and maturity, and the fact that it's actually a very well-written and acted little piece of cinema.So it's really no wonder why you can Say Anything you want about "Say Anything..." but you cannot deny that it is not a great movie!10/10